Friday, May 11, 2018

The Juggernaut of Self

Have you ever felt like you were drowning in a juggernaut of self? Have you ever felt your egotistical concerns spilling out of you like volcanic lava that eradicates everything in its path? Talk about Pandora’s Boxes, once you jump off the precipice into the well of self-involvement, it’s hard to see the forest from the trees. Blinding selfishness of this chronic sort can hit you like a rabbit punch and it occurs like eczema, herpes, shingles and other viral skin conditions that can lie dormant for years before they strike. You are never immune. You might be struck in the middle of a particularly selfless moment when you receive a message that's the equivalent to the dreaded letters potential recruits received during the dreaded days when there was a draft. The only difference is that the message comes not from the Department of the Army but from the executive center of your brain. Actually it may be the mind that’s responsible, but the activity itself is better known as belly button gazing. But does the juggernaut of self actually take a form? You think of genies popping out of bottles or the spirits and doppelganger’s that hover around the Christian self still smarting from the trauma of original sin. Is it one of those dark presences of gothic myth that emerges from a Transylvanian forest or the devil incarnate, a dark brooding fecal cloak that emerges from the deepest recesses of one’s being? The Revenge of the Body Snatchers? The Night of the Living Dead? The answer is yes.

About Me

Francis Levy's debut novel, Erotomania: A Romance, was released in August 2008 by Two Dollar Radio.
His short stories, criticism, humor, and poetry have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Village Voice, The East Hampton Star, The Quarterly, Penthouse, Architectural Digest, TV Guide, The Journal of Irreproducible Results, and other publications. One of his Voice humor pieces was anthologized in The Big Book of New American Humor (HarperCollins). He is presently the Co-Director of The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination (philoctetes.org), where he supervises roundtable discussions on topics as varied as “The Psychology of the Modern Nation State” and “Modern Traffic Theory, Behavior, and Imagination”.